The residence is built on the western hillside of Mt. Moiwa, overlooking the city of Sapporo. Although, being the 5th largest city in Japan, the cumulative amount of snow cover in the winter season exceeds 6 meters.

From the casual lifestyle of the client and his wife, and also the request to have a part of the house turn into a cafe in the future, we aimed to create a space to be flexible to support various events, such as the new birth of a child or starting a new cafe, where various life-scenes exist with reasonable distances to each other inside a simple void, like a barn.

The site is located in a quiet residential area, which is off a highway along a medium size road. In addition to houses, wooden rented apartments, offices, and shops are mixed in somewhat sparsely among the neighborhood. This building has a rather large volume for a house, and is also larger than the neighboring buildings. Therefore, we intended to fit the building into the surrounding context.

Rather than imposing our own designs unilaterally, we think of clients as equal partners in the process of discussing requests and problems, which are then resolved through design and planning. While the end product of this process is a physical structure, we think of our fundamental role as designing human-to-human and human-to-environment relationships.

Our goal is to create architecture whose meaning and purpose is derived through ongoing communication with clients.

The parcel is located in the north of a city named Sapporo, where the housing block is split like a grid. Surrounded by 3 buildings, a tiny parcel that contains about 100 sq. meters was left over. On the east side of the building, there is a promenade with an old growth poplar forest who acts as a windbreaker. It hasn’t a direct influence over the parcel itself, but it indirectly contributes the building standard law, what causes an inevitable set back distance, so it comes to a 40 sq. meter amount of spaceon the inside of the parcel. I designed the space for the couple and their two children, with thinking about the height of the building